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Main Authors: Jian, Rong-Lin, Chen, Ting-Yao, Lin, Yu-Fan, Lee, Chia-Ming, Yang, Fu-En, Wang, Yu-Chiang Frank, Hsu, Chih-Chung
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02785
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author Jian, Rong-Lin
Chen, Ting-Yao
Lin, Yu-Fan
Lee, Chia-Ming
Yang, Fu-En
Wang, Yu-Chiang Frank
Hsu, Chih-Chung
author_facet Jian, Rong-Lin
Chen, Ting-Yao
Lin, Yu-Fan
Lee, Chia-Ming
Yang, Fu-En
Wang, Yu-Chiang Frank
Hsu, Chih-Chung
contents Color ambient lighting normalization under multi-colored illumination is challenging due to severe chromatic shifts, highlight saturation, and material-dependent reflectance. Existing geometric and low-level priors are insufficient for recovering object-intrinsic color when illumination-induced chromatic bias dominates. We observe that DINOv3's self-supervised features remain highly consistent between colored-light inputs and ambient-lit ground truth, motivating their use as illumination-robust semantic priors. We propose CANDLE (Color Ambient Normalization with DINO Layer Enhancement), which introduces DINO Omni-layer Guidance (D.O.G.) to adaptively inject multi-layer DINOv3 features into successive encoder stages, and a color-frequency refinement design (BFACG + SFFB) to suppress decoder-side chromatic collapse and detail contamination. Experiments on CL3AN show a +1.22 dB PSNR gain over the strongest prior method. CANDLE achieves 3rd place on the NTIRE 2026 ALN Color Lighting Challenge and 2nd place in fidelity on the White Lighting track with the lowest FID, confirming strong generalization across both chromatic and luminance-dominant illumination conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/ron941/CANDLE.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_02785
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CANDLE: Illumination-Invariant Semantic Priors for Color Ambient Lighting Normalization
Jian, Rong-Lin
Chen, Ting-Yao
Lin, Yu-Fan
Lee, Chia-Ming
Yang, Fu-En
Wang, Yu-Chiang Frank
Hsu, Chih-Chung
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Color ambient lighting normalization under multi-colored illumination is challenging due to severe chromatic shifts, highlight saturation, and material-dependent reflectance. Existing geometric and low-level priors are insufficient for recovering object-intrinsic color when illumination-induced chromatic bias dominates. We observe that DINOv3's self-supervised features remain highly consistent between colored-light inputs and ambient-lit ground truth, motivating their use as illumination-robust semantic priors. We propose CANDLE (Color Ambient Normalization with DINO Layer Enhancement), which introduces DINO Omni-layer Guidance (D.O.G.) to adaptively inject multi-layer DINOv3 features into successive encoder stages, and a color-frequency refinement design (BFACG + SFFB) to suppress decoder-side chromatic collapse and detail contamination. Experiments on CL3AN show a +1.22 dB PSNR gain over the strongest prior method. CANDLE achieves 3rd place on the NTIRE 2026 ALN Color Lighting Challenge and 2nd place in fidelity on the White Lighting track with the lowest FID, confirming strong generalization across both chromatic and luminance-dominant illumination conditions. Code is available at https://github.com/ron941/CANDLE.
title CANDLE: Illumination-Invariant Semantic Priors for Color Ambient Lighting Normalization
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.02785